Time to move on

After a busy August on trek, and a hectic start to September, I suddenly find myself at home in the UK. My placement finished with a crazy final flourish, and I'm back on English soil - for a few weeks at least. I'm moving on to my next role, and for now it's time to say goodbye to The Gambia. 

It's a strange time to leave the country; with the threat of the Ebola virus hanging over everyone I can't help worry about the people I have come to know and love. Signs have gone up in shops to remind people not to shake hands (which really goes against usual cultural greetings), and awareness is rising about the disease so I hope it stays away. 

A familiar sight in shops and offices

I was talking to someone the other day who found it incredible that I had signed up for two years right from the beginning - they assumed I had extended a one year placement. I explained to him that I was fairly certain I'd like it, and that as far as I could see the benefits of a two year placement outweighed the risk of not liking it. Looking back over the last two years I can definitely say that I made the right decision. I had wanted to volunteer with VSO for years, I had the freedom to take a two year placement, and I felt that two years would help me to make the most of the opportunity. It takes a while to settle in to a new role, let alone a new country and continent, and I figured that one year would just go by too quickly. And looking back, it really seems like the time flew by. It wasn't always easy, and sometimes it felt like time stood still, but on the whole, the two years passed in a flash. 

I feel so lucky to have met so many great people and experienced such variety. Saying goodbye was tough, especially to those I might not see again, but I'm hopeful that I'll get to see a fair few of my new friends - in England but also in West Africa, as quite a few of us have made lasting connections and commitments in the region.   

For now, here's a couple of pictures from my last few days. I've enjoyed sharing my Gambian experience through this blog, and all that remains form me to say is... if you fancy volunteering just do it! I thoroughly recommend volunteering with VSO, and if you have the opportunity I really don't think you'll regret it. There are so many different roles and different placements, why not take a look! 

Leaving drinks at Caribe

Last afternoon on the beach, watching a man wash rams in the sea!

Saying goodbye to this one was particularly tough! 

Green food

September is the season for green food. Green oranges and green grapefruit start to fill the market stalls, and most exciting, bright green avocados hang from the trees like jewels.

After sunny mango season I'm looking forward to avocado season, and I'm enjoying the opportunity to eat fruit that's in season and picked fresh from a nearby tree. 

Guacamole, not Orville in a blender

Youth participation and engagement

One of the current VSO projects here in The Gambia has been designed to encourage youth participation and engagement. Three volunteers, in three different areas (two very rural) have been working with youths, council officers and local stakeholders to make sure that young people are able to form organised youth groups and access services and schemes that could help them fulfil their economic and social potential. As part of this, all three volunteers have run youth camps in the last month, arranging training for local young people on subjects such as proposal writing, business development, and resource mobilisation. As part of our monitoring trek we called in to a youth camp in Kerewan, and visited a couple of youth groups in Kuntaur. 

The youth camp for Kerewan was held at Njawara Agricultural Training Centre, which you may recognise from some of the Training of Trainers work that we have done as part of the groundnut project. Maja, the VSO volunteer, and her colleagues had organised a youth camp for around 45 young people, with a full day time agenda of useful lessons, and a fun social evening agenda with drama, cultural dance, sports activities and quizzes. Abdoulie and I were there for the closing ceremony, during which time we heard the final speeches and watched a play staged by the young people to represent what they had learned during the camp. 

The obligatory group photo!

Rehearsing for the closing ceremony play

The top table

Closing ceremony audience

While in Kuntaur we had a different experience. We travelled to a village to meet some of the young people who had already attended the Kuntaur based youth camp, and were putting into practice some of the things they had learned. The youth group was very well organised, and members were working to develop a whole range of skills and services that will help them to earn money and become economically stable. Brick making, carpentry, tie dye, and farming were just some of their activities. They have even set up their own savings scheme and give loans and credit facilities to their youth group members to develop business ideas. It was really interesting to hear them talk.  

One business idea that they were working on was making beauty and health products out of natural resources. They showed us the moringa seeds and beeswax they collect to process into soaps, and the natural insect repellent that they make using boiled neem tree leaves mixed with melted down bath soap. 

Moringa seeds, used in soap for skin benefits

Insect repellent

Beeswax in a raw form. This will be boiled to process it.

Group shot with some of their tie dye
and certificates from the youth camp.

Next we travelled to another village to meet a youth group who told a similar story of ow they have put their new business skills into use, helping them to develop their entrepreneurial activities. This group were doing tie dye and soap making amongst other things, and even had their own bakery run by the youth association members. The great thing about this group was the amount of young women involved. The volunteer, Deborah, reported in her final placement evaluation that the most meaningful change was that now, after some focused sensitisation on the importance of including women, communities were sending young people - especially young women - to the youth activities (instead of sending old men which they were doing at first) and the women had become noticeably more confident - actively engaging in events. We could certainly see the evidence of that here.

Great female turnout

Deborah and the group leader with some products.

Girls on one side, boys on the other!
I love how they are looking across at each other!

Group shot with happy faces.

Monitoring our farmer field schools

Last Sunday Abdoulie, Alieu and I set out for trek, a monitoring visit to see the farmers we've been working with on the World Bank project, and to check some of the youth engagement activities run by our youth engagement and participation volunteers. In addition, as a lot of volunteers are finishing their contracts at the moment, we also did three final placement evaluations. I'll write about the youth engagement work separately. 

We set out at 9:30am, thinking we'd have a nice amount of time in the afternoon to relax at Abdoulie's village. This was not to be as we ended up waiting 8 hours to get on the ferry from Banjul to Barra! However, once we were 'up-country' it was well worth it, seeing how well the farmer field schools have been doing was a real highlight for me.

The concept of the farmer field school (FFS) is to use a demonstration plot to share knowledge and information through practical training. Since our Training of Trainers session on modern agricultural techniques, the extension workers we trained have worked in a number of communities to set up these demonstration farm plots. Here, with groundnut seeds and fertiliser supplied by the project, selected farmers (women and younger farmers where possible) can prepare, sow and farm the land, learning new techniques from the extension workers. The farmers can then share the knowledge they've learned with their fellow growers association members or neighbours, apply the techniques to their own land, and - as an added extra - multiply the seeds we've given them for use next year.

Young farmer! 

When we trained the extension workers I did a slot on monitoring and evaluation so that we could devise a way to test how much new knowledge and information the farmers were learning from the FFS. I devised a simple monitoring tool that the extension workers could use to interview the farmers before and after the training to see where their knowledge improved. Thankfully these forms have been working well, and in addition many of the the extension workers and cluster monitors had really understood the concept of keeping accurate notes, producing detailed records for us.

A very well organised cluster monitor

The visit gave us the chance to see first hand what the farmers had learned. It was incredible. The people we spoke to had really taken key concepts, and despite farming for years in some cases, had learned some really valuable new lessons. For example, many of the farmers we spoke to said they'd now learned the amount of fertiliser they needed to apply, working out the amount by calculating the size of the land and the quantity of seeds sown. Before hand, if they'd bought one whole bag of fertiliser they just assumed they had to put it all on. Pressure from other farmers exacerbated this, such was the belief that you had to use it all other farmers would tell them that if they used less they weren't doing it properly. Fertiliser is expensive. By learning to apply just what they need farmers will be saving thousands of dalasi every year, money which can be invested into other farming inputs or food for the family.

As we are looking to improve the quality of the groundnut and reduce the presence of mould and aflotoxin, we were relieved to hear that the farmers have learned important lessons about harvest and storing techniques that will lower the risk of mould.

We checked the rainfall patterns across the country, as this year the rainy season has been uncharacteristically dry! Usually there is a first rain when farmers prepare the land, and a second rain a few weeks later when the farmers sow. From then the rains continue regularly for germination to take place. This year, the rain disappeared after the seeds were sown and so there has been some crop failure. In one farm the seeds had not germinated at all and had started to go mouldy in the soil. Thankfully though, there was not too much damage, and now the rains have started to come more regularly, so all being well things should be ok - although those who waited for the rain and planted late will be hoping the rain continues into October. However, in Basse they have had more rain and the crops are more established so if the rains do continue into October they will be ruined. It's a tricky business! 

Total crop failure here

Compared to healthy groundnuts in Basse

The farmers were really happy to see us, especially the women, and there was much dancing and singing in the fields during our visits! As I say, this trek was a real highlight for me - a long time out on the road, but absolutely fantastic to see the results of our interventions.

Dancing farmers

These women were so happy to talk to
me in my faltering wollof...

...that they grabbed me to be with them in the group shot! 

Soon put to work with Abdoulie!

Preparing for trek

This week I have been preparing for an eleven day monitoring trek, which Abdoulie, Alieu and I will set out for on Sunday. 

The purpose of the trek is to monitor two projects - the groundnut project and a youth participation project. 

With the youth participation project, the volunteers have been working with young people to help them access services and programmes available for youths, focusing on how to get them into gainful employment or self-employment. They are running some training camps, and we will visit to see how they are getting on, say a few words at the closing ceremonies, and hear from the young people themselves so that we can begin to evaluate the project. 

For the groundnut project we want to see the results of the farmer field schools that have been running since we held the training of trainers session back in May. We also want to check in with the volunteers and see what they have been working on since the annual partnership reviews - especially as some of them will be leaving in a few weeks time. 

And in an interesting twist we will also be visiting weather stations and capturing data about rain fall and crop viability. As I have mentioned, we really haven't had much rain this rainy season, and people are starting to worry. A taxi driver told me that they were doing rain dances in Serrakunda the other week! The low rain could have a really major impact on groundnut and rice harvests this year, amongst other things, which means that there will be food shortages when we move into the dry period. A low crop yield will mean that Gambia will have to rely even more on imported goods, and living costs will spike. So, while we hope for rain we will also have a look at how much rain we have had, how much we had last year, and try and get some data for the final project evaluation. 

The positive part is that because we haven't just focused on agricultural techniques, but have given skills training, such as business management and governance training, the project should still have benefits for the participants even if rainfall affects this years' harvest.  

End of Ramadan round up

Ramadan and Koriteh, as Eid ul Fitr is known here, passed with a lovely two day holiday tagged on to the weekend - very special to get a four day break to recharge the batteries! 

On the final Sunday of Ramadan Nicola and I went for a thirty minute jog along the beach, and as our run finished and the fasting ended we were rewarded with a beautiful sunset. 

Since then time has gone quite 
quickly, meeting up with friends, cooking, and running being my main activities - apart from work of course. 




Nicola and I finished the Couch to 5K NHS running programme. We ran our final run of the programme around Bakau, running past the women's gardens and up around the stadium. We knew that with the C25K the focus is on running for thirty minutes rather than making sure you hit the distance, and because we have been running slowly to combat the heat we weren't quite hitting 5k in 30 minutes. So we mapped 5k and ran it in 39 minutes - it was getting dark when we finished so we had to really slow our speed or risk falling head first into potholes and sandy ditches. Pleased with our achievement but not our speed we tried again a few days later, with a beach run in the early evening while it was still light. With the sea breeze cooling things down to about 32 degrees we managed 5k in 35 minutes which we were happier with! Since then we have been continuing to run and starting to do some interval training to build up speed and stamina. I really recommend the NHS C25K - it was a great way to get back into running, and the gentle approach meant that we acclimatised to running in the heat.   

On the cooking front, the other day I found leeks which was rather exciting, and some nice looking potatoes - a different variety to usual. So I made leek and potato soup, a little taste of England! 

And finally, the other day we met Alieu, Rohey, Omar and their mum Awa, the family that live behind Dr Helen's old house. It was lovely to see them and Alieu joined us for a while, going from dour and shy to cheeky and smiley! 

Glare at the camera!

Laughing not crying!

Trying on Nicola's glasses

Hissing

I think I am becoming a little bit Gambian. For two mornings in a row I have hissed at dogs to alert them of my presence and stop them running out in front of my bike. I still can't bring myself to hiss at human beings though!

In other news, I am eating 'mburru bu fanaan' for breakfast, or 'bread which has spent the night'... in other words - a bit stale. It's also a bit gritty, or sandy. What I would give for a bagel, cream cheese and smoked salmon! Ramadan ends after the weekend, and Koriteh will be celebrated. I will be glad to resume normal breakfasts... not that 'normal' will bring me smoked salmon of course!